Reproduction and Heredity
Excerpt from the Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love
Maturana and Verden Zöller, ed. Bunnell, pp 66-68
The question about genetic (DNA) or non-genetic determination of the
phenomenon of heredity is not a trivial one. Our claim is that the phenomenon of
heredity is a systemic rather than a genetic or molecular one. We do not deny the
participation of DNA in giving long-run stability to biological phenomena and lineages as
well as in determining the range of possible variations in the epigenetic process. Nothing
can happen in the life history of an organism that is not permitted or made possibly by its
genetic constitution, but at the same time nothing is determined (or, more precisely,
predetermined) in the life history of an organism by its genetic constitution, because
every feature in it arises in an epigenic process. Furthermore, as all biologists know, the
phenotype obscures the genotype in the epigenetic process because, in fact, many
different genotypes can give rise to the same ontogenic phenotype. However, not all
biologists are fully aware that epigenesis is a systemic process of mutual structural
modulation that involves both the organism and the medium over the life span of the
organism. And we biologists are not always aware of this because in our modern
inclination to reductionistic thinking, we frequently see the organism as if it were
interacting with a preexisting and already specified medium that contains it, or we make
it disappear altogether in the enhancement of the genes.
The fundamental point in what we say here is our claim that the characteristics of
an organism arise in a systemic dynamics through the recurrent and recursive interactions
of the organism and the medium, in a process in which both the organism and the
medium change together congruently, and not in a manner caused or predetermined by
the genetic constitution of the organism or by the structure of the medium. Accordingly,
we claim that:
1,
Heredity occurs as a systemic process;
2.
The process of evolution follows a course led by the systemic conservation of
changes in the manner of living or the organisms, and not a course led by the genetic
variations, even though these are always involved;
3.
Evolutionary genetic change occurs as a genetic drift, and the course of the genetic
drift in a lineage is channeled by the systemic conservation of the manner of living
that defines the lineage; and
4.
The systemic conservation of a manner of living co-opts any genetic and epigenetic
variation that does not interfere with it.
Thus, evolution as a process of constitution, diversification, and extinction of
lineages is not a process of improvement of the manner of living, or of progress in any
particular or general sense, but it is a continuous changing present that arises in the
continuous systemic conservation of the realization of the living. In evolution nothing
happens because it is necessary, advantageous, or desirable. Indeed, a particular epigenic
course until then optional in a lineage that begins to be systemically conserved as a
manner of living in a new lineage, may become not optional but necessary in the
conservation of the constitution of the new lineage through genetic constraints after
several generations only to the extent that the manner of living conserved may have
channeled the genetic drift of the lineage and the changes of the medium in the
facilitation of the realization of that manner of living. As a result, after a certain number
of generations nothing of the medium or of the manner of living that defines the new
lineage can be easily removed or altered without destroying the organisms of the lineage.
Such alterations would destroy or distort the systemic coherences of the realization of the
organisms that had been established along the history of the lineage. In other words, it is
because of the systemic coherent changes that occur in the organism and medium in the
evolutionary process, that it appears to a casual observer as if the features that define a
lineage had initially arisen because they were necessary, or because they constituted an
improvement for the survival of the members of the lineage.